Day 4 - the 9th

 Moon set over the water

 With a sunrise on the opposite side of the boat!

 And a ship passing right in front of the sunrise...

 AND by the time I came back up from my morning meetings we were docked in Malta - good morning Malta!!

We continued to work throughout the day and toil away with no windows... but by 6pm we were released and we went out on the economy to get some dinner.

We ate at a cute place called the Raffael Restaurant.  The guys I came with ate pizza.  I tried the local dish of roasted Rabbit.  It was tasty!!

and dessert and coffee!  YUM!!!

A nice walk on the docks...

Which are famous for the cats!  I have a video of a yellow tabby who loved me and talked to me... I sent it to Liz to play it for Salem to ask her if she spoke Maltese cat language :)

Day 3 - settling in (Feb 7th)

Sunrise and moon set over the ocean

THIS is why I had a headache after my first night on the boat.  3 degrees was a bit much and caused headaches.

And weirdly there is a light in the next room ... but it never bothered me.  I can sleep with lights coming in and it makes it easier to get out of bed in the middle of the night.

Day 2 - Feb 6th

 This is a small sample of the garbage that can be seen everywhere in/around Naples

 First glance at the boat

 Where are we?  Gaeta (Guy-ay-ta)

 Where we got off the bus to get onto the boat.  Short hike out there to the boat!

 The room that I am in - very different than the other rooms that are in this area of the boat.  I'm very close to the bow of the boat here.

 The lovely glow in the dark sign of what room I'm in... 2nd deck 22nd spine, 0 position in the boat meaning I'm pretty much in the middle. and L is I have no idea!!!

 I have a sink in my room as well - makes it nice for brushing teeth... and again, they think I'm a GS-14 not a GS-13.  I did mention it a few times to those when we were checking in and then again when I got on the boat.  I think I would have been down in the bowels of the ship in a smaller bunk... maybe.  I was told by a few just to keep my mouth shut and go with it.  OK, I did.  I enjoyed it.  I didn't enjoy having to crawl off that dang bunk in the middle of the night, but I did enjoy being a single in the room - I would have liked to have gotten to know someone else, but after I stunk up the room once I was super glad I wasn't with anyone :)  hahaha!

 the view of Gaeta from the boat.

 Looking back at the center tower on the boat.... looking from the back of the boat to the front.

 Proof that I did have a life vest.  We did do a muster at one point as well... just to prove we could.  Some of us had to back track to get this dang thing to go to the deck again.

 The moon over Italy...

And we're off to sea after the helicopter landed and was off loaded.

Feb 5th - off on an adventure

Believe it or not I was trying sooo hard to get out of this trip.  I was SO afraid of having a bowel issue while on the boat.  The more I thought about it and the more I stressed about it, the more I just decided to get over my fear and just GO for it.  Really - why not?  Worse case, I'm dong laundry on the boat.  

Up at 3:30am to get on a 6am flight... I actually woke up at 2:30am - couldn't go back to sleep ... sigh.  SO up early - catching 6am flight..

So day one is Tulip Inn in Naples.  Its very far out from Naples.  Getting there was an an adventure as well.  Our flight was so challenging in that we were coming in on a scholoum.  Scary Scholoum that had us coming in wallowing all the way in... then we had the flight after us be re-routed to Rome for a few hours.  In the mean time we had to walk from the airport around the corner to the base's food court - not my choice by any means, but it was somewhere to go to get out of the HORRIBLE wind and sleet.    There were 25km winds that would about knock you off your feet.

So after everyone got in findally at 5:30 the bus took us out to the Tulip.  We checked in, got settled and headed down for some dinner. 

In the mean time here is the rom I was given.  The room looks weird because it is .. it was HUGE!  The door you see there with the empty room is in the next picture...

This is the room that is empty - yes, that is just an empty room with just what you see here... and nothing that I was going to use!

With ONE chair.  Just one chair...

This is the closet... with a mirror... not that I used that either....

The bathroom was larger... but honestly for a "newer" hotel there were spots in there that I wondered who was in their maintenance crew....

This is the picture I took of my luggage for the 10 days.. yep, this is it.  I had a small fleece blanket in the duffle...and a sweater and some odds and ends.  I did have 10 pair of socks in there and 10 plus pair of underwear... then pants and shirts that I could wear twice.  So.  I made it through the whole time without doing laundry - that's a plus BUT they had a nice laundry set up on the boat for the officers.

Anyway - the stay in the Tulip didn't go so well.  I had issues with diarrhea that night and although protected, not protected enough.  Drat it.  BUT  I'm not going to cry about it.... nothing I could do about it and they did charge my card for the oops... rightly so, I'm OK with that too.  Sh*t happens and we just pay to have it cleaned.  sigh.   Went to bed early to get up and hit the NEXT boat at 7am as well.